In my last post I described the different elements of Lead Management: (1) getting more website traffic, (2) improving conversion, (3) lead nurturing and (4) sales collaboration. In this post I will describe the features that support all four steps. (Which will also loosely define the topics that I will write about in future posts.)

Step 1: Getting more visitors to your website

The key element in this step is to think from the perspective of your potential customers: what are they interested in, and which words do they use when they search for solutions. The entire inbound marketing process is based on this: making sure that customers find you, rather than you trying to find them. Few companies rely solely on inbound marketing, and most try to find a mix that works for them. There are a couple of activities in this step:

• Search engine optimization
• Social Media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogging, Digg, and so on)
• Online advertising (pay-per-click, banners, video, etc.)
• Lead source measurement: ensuring that you know the ROI for each activity

Most of these activities will drive additional traffic to your site, or to a landing page. With these activities you should see a clear increase in website visitors.

Step 2: Getting more visitors to register

The next challenge is to earn the right to have a conversation with the website visitors. You need to offer them good content and entice them to register for something that is valuable to them (whitepaper, webinar). Use testing and web analytics to find out what works best for you. These are areas that are important in this step:

• Content marketing (good content will also make it more likely that prospects find your site)
• Registration forms
• Landing pages
• A/B testing
• Web Analytics

This will turn more anonymous visitors into identified contacts: you’ll get demographic information, and often the permission to send them email.

Step 3: Lead nurturing and scoring

With a lot more contacts in the database, we need to figure out which of them are most interested in our products and services. This can be done with automated email nurturing, collecting additional data, and monitoring the prospect’s interest. These are some relevant areas I’ll be looking at:

• Email newsletters
• Email nurturing: sending a sequence of emails according to rules defined in a campaign
• Deliverability: making sure emails arrive in the inbox, and not in the spam filter
• Lead Scoring: looking at prospect characteristics (e.g. job title) and behavior (e.g. website visits) to find out which prospects are most promising
• Database management: collecting more prospect information, and keeping it up to date

This process works best if you offer useful content, so prospects can educate themselves. That will also make the sales process easier, because the sales rep doesn’t have to explain everything in detail.

Step 4: marketing & sales collaboration

Marketing can have a pretty engaging dialog with prospects via automated campaigns but nothing gets sold without the involvement of a sales rep, especially if you sell an expensive and/or complex product. Many sales & marketing experts recommend that leads only get handed over to sales when they are sales-ready. And if the sales rep decides that a lead is not sales-ready then the lead is passed back to marketing for additional nurturing. This process helps to improve sales & marketing collaboration:

• Integrate Marketing Automation with the CRM system (salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM)
• Anonymous visitor monitoring: seeing which companies visit your website
• Real-time alerts, chat & promos: giving sales reps the tools to interact with valuable prospects while they are still interested
• Website visit replay: seeing what prospects are interested in on your website
• Lead scoring: also a key ingredient of this step, because the lead score will indicate whether a prospect is sales-ready

If executed properly, this process can boost confidence between the Sales and Marketing teams. Sales knows that they’ve gotten quality leads and Marketing knows that sales is motivated to follow-up on every lead.

Summary

It is challenging to include all relevant topics in one short post, but I hope this gives you a good idea of all the activities and tools you can use to streamline your Lead Management process. One important feature that I’d like to mention is reporting. You should frequently run reports to monitor the effectiveness of each step and your overall marketing ROI; your CEO will appreciate that marketing is finally measurable.

Did I forget anything? Please leave a comment if you would use a different classification, or if you would add additional activities and tools.